Toyota officials accused of negligence

Three Toyota officials are under a criminal investigation on suspicion of professional negligence in allegedly shirking recalls.

Toyota officials accused of negligence

11 July 2006

Three Toyota officials are under a criminal investigation on suspicion of professional negligence in allegedly shirking recalls for eight years and not fixing a defect that may have caused an accident.

Toyota has denied the officials engaged in any wrongdoing. The automaker said in a statement it was cooperating fully with the investigation.

Kumamoto police in southern Japan filed papers to prosecutors on Tuesday, a police spokesman said. Accused are three Toyota officials, ages 62, 58 and 55, overseeing quality control at the automaker, he said.

Their names have not been disclosed. Toyota said at least one of the officials had left the company, although reasons for the departure were unclear.

Five people were injured in an August 12, 2004, in Kumamoto in a head-on crash when steering failed in a Toyota Hilux Surf sport utility vehicle, causing it to swing out of control into the wrong lane. One person in the other vehicle suffered injuries requiring 52 days of treatment, while four suffered more minor injuries, police said.

Toyota said a recall was carried out in October 2004 for 330,000 Hilux Surf vehicles manufactured between December 1988 and May 1996. The recall was for a problem part used in the steering system that could break, according to Toyota.

Toyota said the vehicle involved in the accident was manufactured in 1993.

Toyota had received five reports of problems with the steering by 1996, but the problems were limited to repeatedly turning the wheel during parking, and no recall was made then, it said. After additional problems were reported in 2004, Toyota carried our another investigation and decided to carry out a recall.

The model affected by the 2004 recall, totaling 1.2 million vehicles, was sold in 180 nations abroad including the US and Europe, and a recall was carried out in September 2005, according to Toyota. Eighteen cases of problems were reported from overseas, but there were no accidents or injuries, it said.

A Toyota official, speaking on condition of anonymity, quoted police as saying that reports about problems began in 1992, and company officials are accused of being aware of them as early as 1995 or 1996.

The automaker, based in Toyota city, central Japan, said it will continue to make quality a priority.

"We will continue to strengthen quality control under our belief that we must put the customer first and make quality No. 1," it said in the statement.

Toyota has been reporting booming sales in recent years and is growing so rapidly some analysts expect it to overtake struggling General Motors Corp. of the US as the world's biggest automaker in coming years.

But Toyota, known worldwide for impeccable quality, has suffered somewhat of an image problem lately because the number of recalls in has soared, raising doubts whether the automaker can continue to maintain quality standards as it embarks on the next step of global expansion.

A massive scandal in Japan involving recall cover-ups took a huge toll on Mitsubishi Motors Corp., which has booked its third straight year of losses for the fiscal year ended in March. In 2000, Mitsubishi Motors acknowledged it had been systematically hiding auto defects from authorities for more than two decades.

The automaker has announced a spate of recalls since then, and disclosed in 2004 it had failed to come clean in 2000 and had more concealed defects, some of which have been linked to fatal accidents.